The Freakishness of October The Carboniferous. The End of The Carboniferous Period

The end of the Carboniferous period is marked by global climate changes due to the glaciers that covered the South Pole. The mass extinctions that mark the end of other geologic periods were not present, yet many species did go extinct during this time. The marine environments were most affected by these climate changes, so the extinctions were mostly invertebrates that spent their lives in the seas. Horn corals, trilobites and some forms of crinoids were on the road to extinction that would come in the next period,

Climate change
Earth's climate is not constant. Over geological time, the Earth's dominant climate has gone from ice age to tropical heat and from steamy jungles to searing deserts. When such climate change occurs abruptly - either in the form of a global warming or cooling - animals and plants have no time to adapt so mass extinctions can occur.